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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25999552">a silent star-filled heaven</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatmerrywanderer/pseuds/thatmerrywanderer'>thatmerrywanderer</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Ending, Background Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish - Freeform, Blue Sargent &amp; Her Friends, F/M, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion &amp; Lore), POV Blue Sargent, The Raven King Spoilers, Very Sad if you couldn't tell that from the previous tag, but there's a glimmer of happiness at the end?, whatever the tag for the opposite of a fix-it is</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:13:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,296</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25999552</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatmerrywanderer/pseuds/thatmerrywanderer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After Gansey's second death, the rest of the Gangsey have to drive to Cabeswater to help it recreate him from their memories. If Blue isn't careful, her fears and doubts may overwhelm Cabeswater's ability to revive Gansey.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>a silent star-filled heaven</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Takes place immediately after Chapter 66 of The Raven King.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Blue couldn't bring herself to look over to where Gansey's body lay in the grass. She was so focused on Henry's watch slowly relaxing into the normal passage of time, she barely heard Adam speak. But when he spoke the second time, she heard him clearly.</p><p>“But if you asked -- it might die for him.”</p><p>There was a silence that felt far too long before Ronan said, through teary eyes, “Cabeswater? Please. <em>Amabo te.</em>”</p><p>Adam stood up slowly, and Blue saw a far-off look in his eyes. She reached out to hold his hands, and he clasped them with unnatural strength. She could feel the magic running from him off into the distance and coming back, but she couldn't tell what was being communicated. As Adam concentrated, she did her best to open her energy to him.</p><p>“Henry, bring me Gansey,” Adam said. “We need to get to Cabeswater. It can't do anything while we’re here except keep things from getting worse.”</p><p>As if a spring had been released, they all began moving as one. The nearby crows took flight and sped off in a straight line. Ronan rushed towards the driver's seat of the BMW, and let out a noise somewhere in between a victorious whoop and a grunt when it started at his command. Henry held the back door open while Blue and Adam tried to get Gansey's body into the back seat quickly and gently without fully achieving either, but they managed to get the three of them in, with Henry circling around to the passenger seat. Ronan sped off as soon as the doors were closed, doing his level best to break the sound barrier.</p><p>As he drove, Blue braced herself into Adam, trying to stay connected to him and to Gansey without breaking Adam's concentration. Evidently, even keeping things from getting worse was taking a lot of energy. She could feel exhaustion and grief creeping into the corners of her eyes. She let them close and fled her body. She felt her skin -- no, her bark -- growing warm, and she could sense, all around her, the grief of the <em>tir e e'lintes</em>. It seemed as if her whole world was weeping, and above her, just out of reach, the stars themselves mourned. She reached out with her whole soul, and the words for what she wanted to say appeared in her head. <em>Please. Custi lui. Keep him safe.</em> She floated in the darkness for some time, distracted by a different, detached set of feelings and senses.</p><p>Blue was jolted back into her body as Ronan jarred to a stop. She could see Cabeswater just ahead of them. </p><p>“Why are we stopped?” Blue said.</p><p>“I’m not taking Cheng in there. Cabeswater is capricious at the best of times, and he isn’t used to controlling his thoughts. We don’t have time or energy to fix his mistakes.”</p><p>“Ronan!” Blue said indignantly. </p><p>“No, it’s alright. I will hold down the fort here and Robo-Bee will keep my unruly thoughts company,” Henry said. His voice wavered a little, but he clambered out of the passenger seat without wasting any time. “Until you return!”</p><p>Ronan started up the car again before Blue could respond. With Henry behind them, they sped into Cabeswater. Although the demon was dead, the remains of its work were all around them. There was an acrid smell like burning rubber, and black ooze on what seemed like every tree. The BMW clattered and clunked over the uneven ground, but Ronan knew exactly how to push the car to its limits.  Keeping his eyes on the forest in front of him, Ronan shouted backward, “Parrish, where exactly am I going?”</p><p>Adam didn’t reply. Blue looked at him for any sign of a response, and seeing none, said, “I’m sure Cabeswater will tell us if we’re going the wrong direction. I think we just need to get farther in.”</p><p>As they drove, Blue’s legs started to cramp up, but moving them would mean disturbing Gansey, so she just shifted slightly in her seat and tried to focus elsewhere. Gazing out the window, she remembered the last time they had been in Cabeswater, when Aurora had shown them that first dying tree. So much had happened in less than a week. She briefly thought of the three women who had worn her face, then quickly scanned the area in case her thoughts had become real. There was no sign of them, nor even any signs of animal life at all, but then, through the windshield, she saw a small hill with what was possibly the last undamaged tree sitting at the top of it.</p><p>As Ronan drove up to the base of the hill, there was a sudden sound like a bathtub drain closing up, and the car came to an abrupt halt. Adam jolted forward and said, “We’re here.”</p><p>With care, Blue and Adam lifted Gansey's body out of the car, carried him up the hill, and laid him at the foot of the tree. “What do we do now?” she said.</p><p>Adam paused, listening to a whisper in the trees that Blue could almost hear. His face tightened as he started to argue, “I won’t --” then stopped. Ronan walked over and placed a hand on the small of his back. “Cabeswater says we have to leave him here. If we're still here when it goes, we'll die too,” Adam finished.</p><p>“We just have to walk out and hope? Look around! Is Cabeswater going to have the strength to bring him back?” Blue said.</p><p>“Sargent is right. That's not all, is it, Parrish?”</p><p>“It's not. Cabeswater and I... we're not quite understanding each other. It has an idea of who Gansey is, but it doesn't know what he's like. I'm worried it's going to forget.”</p><p>“Then we'll have to help it remember him. As long as we think about who Gansey is, Cabeswater should be able to make those thoughts real, right? No time to lose.” Blue said. She tried to summon happy memories of Gansey, but her longing threatened to overwhelm her. Instead, she settled on remembering him at the rest stop less than an hour before. She thought of how absolutely destroyed he had looked, and how he had painstakingly recreated himself only to let that face go again when he saw it was only her. Feeling his loss so keenly. Sitting next to him on the picnic table and hearing his breath come back under control. The moment when the rest of them arrived, and Gansey shifted, just barely, his power suddenly returning to him. For one last moment, he was a king. Cabeswater was a good listener, and she absolutely ached with her silent wish. <em>Let him be a king again.</em></p><p>She fixed those memories in her mind, took another look at Gansey lying against the tree, turned, and started to march out of Cabeswater. She carefully traversed the rocky terrain with her hands clenched at her sides. Ahead of her, a tree came crashing down with an enormous crack of splinters, threatening to jar Gansey from her thoughts. As she maneuvered around it, Ronan and Adam's longer strides caught up to her, and they moved past her in silence, Ronan giving her a solemn nod as they went.</p><p>She could hear strange music and falling trees all around her as she moved through the forest. Cabeswater was dying. Losing it ached with a nostalgic pang. She had dreamed of having so many more adventures in this beautiful, strange forest, but all of those adventures included Gansey. Cabeswater’s death would be worth it as long as it brought him back. They walked through the forest in silence for some time, Adam adjusting their course every so often. Blue's eyes landed on Adam's fingers, locked intensely with Ronan's. What a miracle, that those two had found each other in the midst of all of this. It occurred to her that there was no world where they would have gotten together without meeting Gansey first. He had such a talent for making people feel lovable, feel loved by him, feel worthy of being loved by him and by others. Her fondness for Adam and Ronan stemmed from Gansey's love for them and her love for Gansey came in part from their love for him. The thought of all that love vanishing from the world brought new streams of tears to her already red eyes. All around her, the trees wept as well.</p><p>As they crested a hill, she could see Henry, blurry in the distance. Soon, they would be back in reality. She saw Ronan turn his head, studying the trees of Cabeswater with an expression of wonderment on his face, even as the forest crumbled around them. She thought of how Gansey had known all along that Ronan was capable of great things. That all he had to do was keep Ronan alive and Ronan would find his way to this. Ronan's face turned anguished and she wondered if he too was thinking of how Gansey had tried to prepare all of them for something like this. The tree-song changed slightly, and Ronan listened. He shook his head as if he was trying to clear water from his ears and redoubled his forward motion.</p><p>Adam, walking hand in hand with him, started to waver, but Ronan pulled closer in to hold him up and kept them moving forward.</p><p>Blue kept bringing her thoughts back to Gansey, Gansey the boy, Gansey the king. As Cabeswater’s desolation grew more complete, she had to trust that it would have enough strength to bring him back and that her, Ronan, and Adam's memories would be enough to remind Cabeswater who he was. She thought of late-night phone calls, atrocious polo shirts, and the smell of mint. How quickly she had fallen in love with all of these boys. Less than a year ago, she had been the weird girl with no friends, and she had liked it that way. Gansey had an almost magical way of drawing people into his orbit and helping them figure out how they fit into the strange constellation that was his life.</p><p>Several dozen yards in front of her, Ronan and Adam were approaching Henry, who was pacing back and forth and looking worried. Adam looked around at Cabeswater, his face unreadable. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. Suddenly, just before they stepped out of Cabeswater, a small flurry of leaves gusted up from Adam's feet to his cheek and then flew backward on the wind. With that, Adam fully collapsed into Ronan's chest, his shoulders heaving with silent sobs. She was the only one still within Cabeswater's limits.</p><p>As she walked towards the others, she suddenly heard something behind her. It was very faint, but it sounded like footsteps. Her heart raced. It was working. She wanted to turn and run to him, or collapse and sob, but she remembered what Adam had said about them being unmade if they were still in Cabeswater when it died, and she forced herself to keep walking. She reached out to what remained of Cabeswater with her thoughts and pushed out a message as hard as she could. <em>Thank you. Grati e wo.</em></p><p>The footfalls behind her became more solid and more urgent. The border between Cabeswater was seconds away when a thought crossed her mind unbidden. Would he still love her? She had been told that her true love would die when she kissed him, and surely it wasn't so easy to cheat fate. What if her true love was gone forever and in his place was a cruel mockery? She imagined the pain when everyone acted as if this new Gansey was exactly the same and only she could tell that he was subtly, essentially, terribly different. As she looked up into the eyes of Ronan and Henry standing across the border, she remembered that she was the only one in Cabeswater. She was the only one who Cabeswater was pulling from to finish the last parts of the new Gansey. She studied Ronan's face in fear, and while his face remained straight, she saw Henry's mouth quirk downwards and his eyebrows fall, and she knew something terrible must be happening. She spun around and saw Gansey saw not-Gansey saw half-Gansey. Half of his face wasn't there. The other half was subtly but unmistakably crueler, colder, sadder. She saw in his eyes a knowledge of what had happened, and as his face filled in, she saw her Gansey.</p><p>His eyes were sad but understanding, for just a moment. Then, all at once, the cruel Gansey returned, Ronan yelled, and a great keening went up from Cabeswater, painfully sharp and high-pitched. The last tree fell and there was an awful crashing sound like a thousand seashells being flung against a rocky beach, a bright flash of light, and arms gripping her by the armpits, pulling her backward and clasping all the way around her.</p><p>The stars were silent. They seemed irrevocably changed and indisputably wrong. Blue wanted nothing more than to be among them, or to be a tree with other trees’ roots encircling hers, or to return to earlier today with Gansey's head on her shoulder and stay there forever. She was deep within herself and she never wanted to come out. She could hear weeping from somewhere in the distance, and someone kept shaking her shoulders. What would life be without Gansey? What was the point?</p><p>Then, Henry's voice came through, soft and clear. “Sargent, you brilliant girl, come back to us. Lynch and Parrish and I are all here. Come back. We need to be together.”</p><p>And she did. And they were.</p>
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